Energy costs continue to escalate in a trend that has accelerated in recent years. Because of this, various industries have become increasingly sensitive to the impact of those rising costs. One area that has drawn increasing scrutiny is the IT infrastructure. Many companies are now looking at their IT systems' power usage to determine whether the energy costs can be reduced. For this reason, an industry focus on energy efficient networks has arisen to address the rising costs of IT equipment usage as a whole (i.e., PCs, displays, printers, servers, network components, etc.).
Modern networking components are increasingly implementing energy consumption and efficiency (ECE) control mechanisms. Some ECE control mechanisms allow physical layer components to enter and exit a low power state. An ECE control policy controls when and under what circumstances, ECE control enabled physical layer components enter and exit low power states. The integration of the control policy decision engine with the controls to the physical layer will affect the overall efficiency attained. The control policy plays a key role in maximizing savings while minimizing performance impact on the network.
The same modern networks that are increasingly using ECE-enabled components also are increasingly using virtualized components. Virtualized environments, managed by virtual machine managers (VMMs) are deployed in different ways, on top of different physical topologies. With ECE in a traditional, non-virtualized network implementation, physical network components, e.g., ports, bridges and network switches, have a more direct connection to the logic that implements the ECE policies. Within virtualized environments however, the underlying physical topology upon which the VM is deployed and the ECE policies attached thereto are not generally visible to the virtual machine manager (VMM).
Challenges to implementing ECE control policies in virtualized network include the dynamic nature of the VM and different types of topologies upon which a VM can be deployed, e.g., VMs that span multiple machines, complex and dynamically changing network topologies, and the maintenance of performance standards.
Thus, what is needed is a virtual machine power manager (VMPM) with power and topology information that overcomes the shortcomings described above.
The invention is described with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.